How Safe Is Our Food?

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With outdated laws and overworked agencies, are American food safety programs failing us? Find out the facts and learn how to protect yourself from foodborne illness.

We’re joined by Dr. Marion Nestle, professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University. She is the author of a number of books including “Safe Foods: Bacteria, Biotechnology and Bioterrorism.”

As always, our expert guests answer your questions.

Announcer:The opinions expressed on this webcast are solely the views of our guests. They are not necessarily the views of HealthTalk, our sponsors or any outside organization. And, as always, please consult your own physician for the medical advice most appropriate for you.

Judy Foreman:
Hello, and welcome to HealthTalk Live. I'm your host, Judy Foreman. This is the time of year when food is a big focus. It's a time when we sit down to holiday meals with friends and family. But how safe is the food we eat? Where does it come from? How can you protect yourself against food borne illness? We will answer these questions and many more tonight on HealthTalk Live.

I'm very pleased to welcome Dr. Marion Nestle, professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University. She is also the author of a number of books including "Safe Foods: Bacteria, Biotechnology and Bioterrorism."

Dr. Marion Nestle, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Dr. Marion Nestle:
Well, it's my pleasure it be here.

Judy:
Good. Well, your latest book, "Safe Food," is quite impressive. It certainly has opened my eyes. I suspect I am like many other Americans in that I've never really thought about where my food comes from or how safe it is. I have naively assumed that government agencies were making sure that the food producers brought safe products to the market. I would like to start by asking you to lay out for us who is in charge here? What agencies in the federal government are responsible for food safety?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, the two big ones are the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, and the fact that it's split between two agencies has a long history dating back to 1906, when the government passed the first Food and Drug Act. They passed two different acts, one dealing with most of the foods in the food supply and the other dealing with meat and poultry. And at the time, both of those acts were going to be implemented by agencies within the Department of Agriculture, one of them for meat and poultry and one of them for everything else.

And over the years the agency that dealt with the everything else, that is the FDA, got transferred from one agency to another to another and finally ended up in the Department of Health and Human Services. So there is this big split and division between the Department of Agriculture and the FDA. They are in two different federal agencies operating under two different acts of legislation with very, very different rules and not nearly as much cooperation as one would want.

Judy:
Oh, God. So, it's actually quite a bureaucratic mess, isn't it? I mean, for instance, I've read that peanut butter is regulated by the FDA, the US Food and Drug Administration, while chicken pot pies are regulated by the USDA, the Department of Agriculture.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it's got meat in it, because it's got chicken in it, so therefore, it would be USDA. If it has vegetables in it, it's regulated by both.

Judy:
It's confusing. I mean, who would have thought though that a frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the FDA, but if it has pepperoni, the same thing is regulated by the USDA, right?

Dr. Nestle:
Yes. I mean, there are examples of things in the regulations that are so completely ridiculous and irrational that all you can do is laugh.

Judy:
Like what?

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, I can never remember which is which, but one of the agencies is responsible for regulating beef broth and the other one is responsible for regulating chicken broth, but if the broths are in tubes the agencies are reversed.

Judy:
Oh, God.

Dr. Nestle:
I mean, I think that's a prime example of the most ridiculous thing ever, and these things wouldn't matter, they would be funny if there weren't lives at stake. And what has happened with our food supply is that as it's gotten more and more industrialized, animals have gotten closer to plants, and so the spinach outbreaks that occurred last year was - because it was bad spinach it was FDA - but the cause of the spinach outbreak was undoubtedly manure coming from cows, and those are regulated by USDA. So something has to be done to bring these agencies together. And for at that reason, food safety advocates for years have been proposing that what we really need is a single food safety agency that oversees the whole thing and tries to bring some rationality into it.

Judy:
Yes, so right now there are like a dozen different agencies responsible for food safety?

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, at least, with probably 25 different acts of congress that govern what they do. But FDA and USDA are the big ones. They're the ones that really matter.

This historical business is very difficult to talk about, but it's very important. One of the most profound differences is the way the funding goes. The funding for the Food and Drug Administration, which does 80 percent of the foods in the food supply, is 20 percent of the food safety budget. And the USDA, which does 20 percent of the food in the food supply, gets 80 percent of the budget.

And the reason for that has to do with the fact that both agencies get their funding from the congressional agricultural appropriations committee.

Judy:
It's the same committee?

Dr. Nestle:
The same committee, and its agricultural appropriations for both the FDA and USDA. Even though FDA is a health agency, it gets its funding from an agricultural committee left over from history from 1906.

Judy:
Oh, so that's why they give more to the USDA.

Dr. Nestle:
Of course it is. They're an agricultural committee, and they don't really understand the health functions. The job of the agricultural appropriations is to make sure that American agriculture is in good shape.

Judy:
Well, you mentioned that some people, some food advocates think they should be just one single agency. Is congress considering that? And if so, who is for it, and who is against it?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, first of all, it's not just advocates that have been interested in a single food agency. The General Accounting Office, now the Government Accountability Office, which is sort of a watchdog agency that looks government, has been arguing for years that that is the only solution to the food safety problems in this country and that we need a single food agency to kind of start from scratch on the whole thing and oversee food production, the safety of food production from farm to table. We don't have a farm to table food safety system in this country. We only have rules, standard food safety rules applied to a very, very small number of foods: Meat, poultry, juices, sprouts.

Judy:
Sprouts?

Dr. Nestle:
Sprouts, because there was a lot of problems with contamination of sprouts, so they have to be produced under these standard food safety procedures, but the rest of the foods don't have to be.

Judy:
You mean, I could grow lettuce in unhygienic conditions and sell it and no one would ever know about it?

Dr. Nestle:
As long as nobody died, there would never be a problem.

Judy:
Wow. Well, if a single agency makes so much sense, why hasn't it happened?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, for all the usual reasons in Washington. Creating anything new in Washington is extremely difficult. Neither the USDA nor the FDA wish to give up their entrenched bureaucracies on this or whatever power they have on it.

There are several legislators, Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut particularly, has been interested in this, and she has put in a couple of bills to try to do something about that, and it's becoming more and more of an issue as more is learned about the weakening of the Food and Drug Administration over the last 20 years.

The FDA's own science advisory committee has just come in with a scathing report about the quality of science and technology at the agency. And the report is an enormous plea for more resources, which I think would help. But because it's a board of the FDA itself, it's not going to be in a position of advocating for a major structural change.

Judy:
Right.

Dr. Nestle:
That has to come from outside.

Judy:
Wow. Well, is it true that all food recalls are voluntary?

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, yeah.

Judy:
So the FDA doesn't have the power to…

Dr. Nestle:
No.

Judy:
Well, what about the USDA?

Dr. Nestle:
No. They're voluntary. The FDA doesn't have congressional authority to do that, so all it can do is go to the producer of the foods that have been identified as having problems and say "Would you please, pretty please, would you please recall your products so you don't kill anybody?" And the companies don't have to.

Judy:
And what's in it for them to recall it? I mean, they will get bad publicity from causing the problem, but…

Dr. Nestle:
But they get terrible publicity from the recall.

Judy:
Yeah, so why would they?

Dr. Nestle:
So, companies hate doing recalls. They just hate it.

Judy:
I mean, it's a total disincentive.

Dr.Nestle:
Yeah. There is no incentive at all to do a recall. I mean, it really has to be compulsory because they're expensive, they're horrible, negative publicity, and then you can never get the recalled products completely back. Either they have already been sold and have been eaten or they are still on the shelves forever.

So it's a system that really doesn't work very well. And I have talked to FDA officials and said, "Well, what's it like to try to get a company to do a recall?" And they say, "Well, sometimes the conversations can be rather strained."

Judy:
I bet.

Dr. Nestle:
If necessary the FDA can threaten to go public, but they are really not supposed to do that. They are not supposed to reveal the names of companies that are producing unsafe foods unless the companies choose to do the recall themselves. And all of this came out during the pet food recall this year.

Judy:
So there are probably a lot more cases of contaminated food than the press and therefore the public ever hears about.

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, yes. There would be millions of cases that are never reported and that nobody would know about. You know, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that there are 76 million cases of food poisoning a year, 350,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths.

Judy:
Wow.

Dr. Nestle:
Those are their sort of standard figures. Those are approximations, but it's huge. It's absolutely huge. And most people, when you have an episode of food poisoning, you don't think a thing about it. You know, you're uncomfortable for a few hours, and then you're fine the next day as long as you don't have something that is particularly toxic. It's those particularly toxic ones that get everybody very upset.

Judy:
The first part of your book deals with the politics of food borne, microbial illness. Tell us a little bit about the biology of this. You know, what is a food borne illness? And how is it spread?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, a food borne illness is something that has a bacteria, a virus, a protozoa in it or something that causes an infection. And we have always had this. It used to be eggs at picnics that you would get salmonella in the eggs, because they had been sitting out at room temperature for too long, or a Thanksgiving turkey would be out of the refrigerator.

But the hazards these days are much, much more serious because there are newly emerged bacterial hazards like Listeria and E.coli 015787, the toxic form of salmonella, and some others, that never were problems before the early 1980s when industrial agriculture really came into its own.

When you have the system when you have got lots and lots of farm animals in a confined place or, you know, millions of animals coming into a slaughterhouse or whatever, anything, any one of them that is carrying a disease organism can spread it to others, and that's what happened. And unless you are working in all of these places from farm to table with these standard food safety procedures… We know how to produce safe food, by the way.

Judy:
We do?

Dr. Nestle:
It's not a mystery. Oh, yeah. The standard food safety procedures are called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, an awful name that just makes your eyes glaze over, but it's very simple procedures where you identify the places in your production processes where hazards can occur and bacteria could get into the food, for example. You take steps to prevent that from happening, you monitor to make sure that those steps are being followed, and then you test to make sure that mistakes haven't been made. And these procedures were designed for NASA decades ago to make sure that astronauts weren't going to get food poisoning in outer space.

Dr. Nestle:
I don't think so. I don't think so. So the idea was to develop procedures that would absolutely make sure that astronauts didn't get food poisoning, and it's worked.

Judy:
So why can't this be translated to food for the rest of us?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, because the companies don't want to.

Judy:
Well, I mean, does it cost a ton of money?

Dr. Nestle:
It costs some, and food companies don't like being told what to do, and they don't like regulation. They don't like having the government involved in what they are doing, and they fight it.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
And they fight it. And you need a lot of people dying before you can make any progress on any of this.

And if you remember the Jack in the Box incident from the early 1990s when some children died from eating hamburger that was contaminated with E.coli 015787 - that was responsible for the Department of Agriculture finally imposing HACCP regulations on meat and poultry producers, and the number of contaminations went down.

You would never know it from the number of recalls, but in fact the number of outbreaks from meat has gone down. And now most of the outbreaks that we are seeing are being seen in vegetable products, which are not being produced under these kinds of conditions.

Judy:
So, the vegetable products get contaminated because the animals are living so close by?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, yeah, the spinach episode for example, the big bagged spinach. They actually don't know what caused the contamination, but they were a mile away from a cattle crossing. And when they went in and tested, there were lots of signs around the cattle crossing that the animals themselves, their feces, the water and the soil around there all had the precise kind of E.coli 015787, that was found in the bagged spinach.

Judy:
Well, were the cows sick?

Dr. Nestle:
No. The cows don't get sick from this particular bacteria, and that's what makes it so difficult.

Judy:
I see.

Dr. Nestle:
It's just very bad for us, but it doesn't do anything to them.

Judy:
I see.

Dr. Nestle:
So they just shed it in their feces.

Judy:
And then it goes in the water to the veggies.

Dr. Nestle:
And it goes in the water, and the water gets on the veggies. I mean, nobody really knows how that happened, but it did happen.

Judy:
It sure did.

Dr. Nestle:
And so the proximity of dairy farms, for example, to vegetable fields is something that a lot of people are very worried about.

Judy:
What would be the fix for that?

Dr. Nestle:
Separating them by a very large area.

Judy:
But that could be hard to do…

Dr. Nestle:
Well, the other is the fix that the packing plant - the Earthbound Farms packing plant actually is doing, which is they now bring the leafy greens into their packing plant. They test them for all these bacteria. They hold them until the tests come back, then they go through their wash procedures, and then they test them again before they go out of the plant.

Judy:
Every single leaf of spinach or is it random?

Dr. Nestle:
No, no. They do statistical sampling.

Judy:
Yeah. So you write about the politics of all…

Dr. Nestle:
All of this is politics.

Judy:
Well, who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? What's really going on?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, in a sense it's not good guys and bad guys. It's everybody trying to make the best of a very bad situation. I think we need better regulations of food safety. If I were the czar of food safety, I would want HACCP regulations from farm to table. I would want everybody using HACCP plans with testing for pathogens for every single food that is produced. I think we would save a lot of problems that way.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
Now, those plans would have to be designed well. You would need to bring in, as Earthbound Farms did, you would need to bring in a consulting microbiologist who actually knows what he's doing - they happen to have a very good one. And that person has to design a really sensible plan, and then everybody has to follow it.

Judy:
And I guess there has to be a policing function to make sure they are following it.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, that would certainly help. And in one of the big meat recalls this year, it was perfectly obvious that they weren't following the rules that they were supposed to be following.

Judy:
Well, if you had to put a number on it, how safe or dangerous is the food we eat compared to the idea?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, if it's cooked, it's not a problem.

Judy:
Anything that's cooked is okay?

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah, because from the standpoint of biologic contaminants, they are going to be killed with cooking.

The reason why hamburger is so much more a problem than steak is that when you cook steak, even if you only cook it a little bit, you are searing the bacteria or the viruses, or whatever organisms are on the outside are going to get killed.

Judy:
What about the ones on the inside?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, hamburger is a problem because there is a huge surface area, and if the inside isn't thoroughly cooked, then they are not going to be cooked.

Judy:
What about the inside of a big hunk of steak, though? That doesn't get cooked either.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, but it's not pierced. It's only a problem if something from the outside - the bacteria are going to be on the outside. They are not going to be on the inside.

Judy:
Why is that? Why can't they migrate in?

Dr. Nestle:
They don't migrate.

Judy:
Okay.

Dr. Nestle:
They don't. They are on the surface.

Judy:
I see. So hamburgers just have a lot more outside in a sense.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, they have phenomenal amounts of outside because they have, every little particle has a lot of outside on it.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
And if you took a steak and you chopped into it or got one of those gadgets that punches holes in it, then you would be introducing bacteria into the interior of the meat. But if you don't do that, you are sterilizing the outside when you sear it.

Judy:
Oh. So that's a little reassuring.

Dr. Nestle:
So that's why hamburger is a problem.

Judy:
I see.

Dr. Nestle:
Because if you want rare hamburger, you are taking a risk that there is no serious bacteria in the middle of it. How much of a risk? Nobody has any idea.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
Not every piece of hamburger is going to be contaminated. It's relatively rare to have one.

Judy:
Well, who is most at risk for dying or getting seriously sick from contaminated food?

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, people who don't have a very strong immune systems.

Judy:
Is it kids or the elderly?

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah. The elderly and young children, pregnant women, anybody whose immune system isn't up to snuff. And then people whose immune systems haven't developed.

Judy:
Developed. Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
So, pregnant women because they have a fetus who is vulnerable, young people because they don't have a developed immune system, anybody who is sick and on drugs that interfere with immunity, and older people because their immune systems aren't as good as they used to be. And you see this in the number of cases.

Judy:
Well, is the number getting better or worse? Is the problem getting better or worse?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, this year was a bad year for outbreaks. It was a bad year. There was a big spike in them this year.

Judy:
And that was because of the spinach or what?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, the spinach was one, and then there was the pet food, and an enormous ConAgra recall of ground meat, and that bizarre business with peanut butter and the salmonella. I mean, there were just a lot of them one after another after another. The Taco Bell business.

Judy:
I am glad I ate dinner before this show. I don't think I will be able to eat for a day.

Dr. Nestle:
Just cook the vegetables. That's all you have to do is cook them.

Judy:
I suppose that's true.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, wash your bagged salads and cook your vegetables. It would help a lot if people did that.

Judy:
Isn't the point of bagged salads that you don't have to wash them?

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah. But they've been sitting in a bag for how long? We live on the East Coast. If you are getting a bagged salad from California, I would wash it.

Judy:
Do you have to wash it with anything special?

Dr. Nestle:
No. Just water.

Judy:
Just plain water?

Dr. Nestle:
It's not going to take everything off, but it will sure help.

Dr. Nestle:
If you are going to use hot water, you might as well cook it.

Judy:
Right. Cooked lettuce? Yuck.

Dr. Nestle:
I mean, the thing about the spinach that was so sad really was that all you had to do was take that spinach and drop it into boiling water for 30 seconds, and the problem would have been solved.

Judy:
But then would you be able to use it in a salad?

Dr. Nestle:
No, because it would be cooked.

Judy:
Yeah, right. So a lot of people like their spinach in a salad.

Dr. Nestle:
So, it's the raw stuff that's the problem.

Judy:
Yeah. Does irradiating food make it safer or more dangerous? A lot of people fear the radiation, but I have always thought that there was nothing to fear.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, I don't like it much.

Judy:
Why not?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, first of all it changes the taste and texture and flavor of the foods, and also it's a late stage techno fix. That's just what I call it, "a late stage techno fix." You have got a dirty product that's ready to be dealt with, and then you irradiate it? That doesn't make any sense to me. I think food should be clean to begin with.

Judy:
Well, what's wrong with a late stage techno fix? I mean, isn't that better than no techno fix?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, I have to quote my friend Carol Tucker Foreman on this one. As she puts it, "Sterilized poop is still poop."

Judy:
Yeah, but it wouldn't hurt you, would it?

Dr. Nestle:
No.

Judy:
So I'm sure she's right. And, by the way, she is no relation that I know of. But I would think that sterilized poop would be a lot healthier than unsterilized poop.

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah, but it doesn't have a very attractive…

Judy:
No. I can't see it on a menu.

Dr. Nestle:
And you can't irradiate spinach. You can't.

Judy:
Well, what can you irradiate, and what can't you?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, there are very few foods that are currently irradiated. Spices are one of them. The outside of papayas and mangoes and tropical fruits that are coming from Hawaii are sometimes irradiated, and now there's some ground beef that's irradiated.

Judy:
Do foods that have been irradiated have to carry labels saying that they have been irradiated?

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah, but they are really tiny. You need glasses to read them.

Judy:
Oh, God. That seems like a fixable problem.

Dr. Nestle:
No. Congress in its infinite wisdom said that they could make them as small as they wanted to.

Judy:
Well, what in your view are the most dangerous food products? Is it processed food or raw food, or how would you rate that?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, dangerous in what way?

Judy:
Well, likely to make you sick or dead.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, I think dirty hamburger.

Judy:
Okay. Because of all that surface area.

Dr. Nestle:
It's the one that causes the most problems.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
Or a dirty fish isn't so great either.

Judy:
A dirty fish. And where does processed food versus, I don't know, regular foods, is processed food in general…

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it depends on - I mean, what are you talking about? Are you talking about things in packages?

Judy:
Yes.

Dr. Nestle:
They are usually fine.

Judy:
Okay.

Dr. Nestle:
They are dry. There is no bacteria growing in them usually.

Judy:
Because they are hygienically sealed or whatever?

Dr. Nestle:
They're dry. Yes. You know, they are cooked, they are dried, whatever. They are too dry to support bacterial growth.

Judy:
So bacteria need moisture?

Dr. Nestle:
They do.

Judy:
Okay. Well, overall, how safe is our meat supply, and as you said that is a USDA regulated thing, but overall how safe is it?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. If you are an optimist, you say most people don't get sick from eating meat. If you're a pessimist, you say there's 76 million cases of food poisoning a year. And so I don't know how to answer that.

Judy:
And those 76 million are meats or vegetables or all combined?

Dr. Nestle:
They're not all meat, and I can't say how many are. I don't know how many are.

Judy:
And produce is regulated by the FDA?

Dr. Nestle:
The FDA, yes.

Judy:
But not very regulated, it sounds like.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, the FDA can't do anything these days because they don't have any resources.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
So it does the best it can.

Judy:
So nobody sticks a label on lettuce saying this has been inspected by Number 23 and it's fine?

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, no. I mean, it may be that Earthbound Farms is packaging their stuff and saying they have done testing before and after, but I don't think they are putting that on there. They are just doing it.

Judy:
Yeah. What about dairy? Who is regulating that, if anybody?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, that's the USDA.

Judy:
That's the USDA, okay.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, dairy cows are regulated by USDA. And milk, I think milk comes under FDA if it's in a package.

Judy:
People can spend a lifetime figuring out who's in charge.

Dr. Nestle:
I have to look that one up. I'm not sure.

Judy:
So overall, what percent of our food supply comes from the US and what percent comes from abroad?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it depends on which product it is. I mean, there is no overall number that I can say. 80 percent of our shrimp comes from abroad, for example. And some hefty percentage of food ingredients like vitamins or some of the food additives that get put in, a lot of those are coming from international places. And more and more is coming internationally because they can do it cheaper than we can.

Judy:
Well, tell us, trace a food item, like maybe beef, and tell us where it might come from, and where an animal destined for market is actually slaughtered, and where it's packaged and sent to market.

Dr. Nestle:
They do a lot of traveling. Beef does a lot of traveling.

Judy:
Tell us.

Dr. Nestle:
Yes,for example, you would have the small steers - when they are very young, they would be raised in a place that raises very young animals. And then they might be shipped to Mexico to move on to the next stage because it's cheaper there.

Judy:
They are shipped live?

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, yeah. They would be shipped to Mexico and then they would be shipped back. And they'd go to some packing plant in Colorado or Nebraska or one of those places, wherever the packing plants are. So they move around quite a bit. They come in from Canada. They go back and forth across the border.

Judy:
Wow. It's a fascinating industry actually.

We have a couple of e mails that have come in. Tina sent us this e mail. She writes, "What foods are not inspected and regulated by the U.S. government?"

Dr. Nestle:
They all are. I can't think of any that aren't, but I don't know about the inspection. It's sampled inspection. I mean, they couldn't inspect everything. That would be impossible. There's just too much. I have read one place that there are 25,000 shipments of food that come into the United States every day.

Judy:
From abroad?

Dr. Nestle:
From abroad - from Canada, Mexico, the borders, someplace. They just pour in. I mean, those would be container loads I guess. And then a thousand truckloads are coming across the border. I mean, there's no way that those things could be all inspected. They could only be sampled. The FDA, by the way, samples one percent of imported foods.

Judy:
Is that enough?

Dr. Nestle:
No, of course not.

Judy:
But it doesn't even sound like we have that tight a system for the foods that we produce here inside the country.

Dr. Nestle:
No. Because we don't have a farm to table food safety system. We don't have regulations that cover most of the foods in the food supply.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
And there's no regulation on farms at all.

Judy:
No regulations on farms?

Dr. Nestle:
No.

Judy:
What do you mean?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it starts at the packing house.

Judy:
Oh. So the conditions in which the vegetables and animals are grown, nobody is in charge of that?

Dr. Nestle:
That's not regulated.

Judy:
Wow.

Dr. Nestle:
Except for organics.

Judy:
Oh, yeah. That's kind of pathetic.

Anyway, Sam in Texas has sent us an e mail, and he writes, "Do Americans have a different tolerance to bacteria in food today than they did a hundred years ago?"

Dr. Nestle:
I don't know the answer to that question. All I can tell you is that if you are an American and you go to Mexico or you go to India - I am just back from India - you get sick the minute you get there.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
And you get sick eating foods that people who live there don't have any trouble with, so there must be a tolerance, and you get used to whatever your local bacteria are.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
And, our food is much cleaner in general than in a lot of other places.

Judy:
So even though you've been painting kind of a dismal picture, we are actually doing better than other countries?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, we do better than other countries in some ways, but not others. And it also depends on which countries you are talking about. As I said, 76 million sounds like a lot of cases of food poisoning, but if you think about 350 million people eating several times a day, 365 days a year, and you multiply all that out, 76 million isn't all that much.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
So, it depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. I think we could do better, but I think we do pretty well.

Judy:
Well, that's interesting.

You mentioned organics being regulated. How are they regulated, and does that mean that organics are actually safer to eat than nonorganic food?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, most of the studies show that they are about the same. I mean, you could have problems with organics just like you could with everything else, but the manure that's used to fertilize organic vegetables has to be treated according to a whole set of rules, and those rules do not apply to conventional vegetables.

Judy:
So organics actually are safer?

Dr. Nestle:
They should be. I'm not saying they are. They should be.

Judy:
Yeah, they are supposed to be.

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah, if people are following the rules.

Judy:
Yeah. What about the imported foods? What jurisdiction do we have, actually, say over foods that we import from China or someplace else?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it's interesting that you ask that, because if you had asked that question two days ago, my answer would have been very different. The United States has just signed an agreement with China that, first of all, requires the Chinese government to impose a regulatory system on producers who produce foods for export so that they will be inspected. The Chinese have agreed to allow the Food and Drug Administration to inspect their exporters on site in China. I mean, these are huge concessions. And that just happened this week.

Judy:
It was just all the bad publicity the past year or so that made this the Chinese…

Dr. Nestle:
Yes.

Judy:
Well, there is something to be said for the power of the press.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, there is an enormous balance of trade issue. The Chinese send much, much more here than we send to them, and they're enormously important trading partners. And they own large sections of United States' debt, so this is something that gets worked out very delicately.

Judy:
Yeah. And they are about to have the Olympics.

Dr. Nestle:
They are, they are.

Judy:
So that may play into it somehow, too.

So how can a consumer tell how far a food has traveled and what country it came from and what the food production standards are in that country? I mean, is there any way to tell when you bite into a hamburger or - especially in a restaurant?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, my short answer to that is you've got to discuss this with your congressional representative, because congress a few years ago passed country of origin labeling that would require most foods, not all, but most foods in the food supply to be labeled with the country that they came from. And then the food industry objected so strenuously that congress postponed it and then postponed it again, and it's currently postponed until 2008. And there are provisions in the new farm bill that would actually implement country of origin labeling, but of course we can't get that farm bill passed. So it's not clear what's going to happen.

But this is one of those things where any time you do a consumer survey and say, "Do you want to know where your food comes from?" the answer is always a resounding yes. And the food industry just opposes it and opposes it and opposes it and finds more and more reasons why it shouldn't come into effect. And it's interesting, because if you go to especially Whole Foods, the supermarket chain, has been doing country of origin labeling for ages, so it's certainly possible to do it.

Judy:
Yeah. I mean, what is the big objection? I mean, does it cost money to put the information on the label and stick it on the package? Or is it just that you don't want to say, "It comes from China"? You don't want to say where it comes from?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it's all of those things. I mean, you would think that American producers would be fighting really, really hard to have it, but in fact they haven't been. And I think that's a mistake, but, you know, the food industry in general does not want to be regulated.

Judy:
Well, no industry wants to be regulated.

Dr. Nestle:
No industry wants to be regulated. And I, of course, think they are crazy, because if they were regulated, they would have a level playing field. Every company would have to play by the same rules, and maybe it would do something to restore consumer trust in the food supply. That would be really nice.

Judy:
That would be lovely. Well, what about after you have bought your food, particularly meat, what about storing it, and storing meat in particular? Are there any general rules for how long meat can be refrigerated safely?

Judy:
How should people interpret the expiration dates on food? Do you really have to throw something away when the label hits the expiration dates?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it depends on what it is. You know, I live in New York City, and I can tell you that by the time milk reaches its expiration date, you don't want to drink it anymore.

Judy:
So, it's already sour?

Dr. Nestle:
It's gone. There may be places where milk lasts longer than that, but there's such a storage problem in small New York City supermarkets that you really want to use it. But it varies. Certainly the use-by date on packaged foods, I don't think it has to be thrown out the instant that's it's there, but you can usually tell by looking at things. If it looks creepy, don't eat it.

Judy:
If it looks creepy, don't eat it. Okay. I have heard there is more bacteria in the average kitchen sink than in most bathrooms. Is that true, and if so, what should we do about that?

Judy:
Should you use that antibacterial soap, or is that not a good idea?

Dr. Nestle:
Most of the evidence that I have seen shows that it doesn't make much difference.

Judy:
That's what I've read too.

Well, is the US more lax in regulating the food supply than other countries? Have we become a dumping grounds for suspect imports that might not be allowed into other countries?

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I mean, I think in general what we have here works pretty well. It's just that as it's gotten more industrialized, the problems get bigger because if you make a mistake and have a problem with bad spinach, it goes to 30 states before and reaches hundreds of people before you can do anything to stop it. So it's really that centralization that has made these problems so much bigger.

Judy:
Well, it must be hard from a -

Dr. Nestle:
But, really, washing and cooking do a lot of good.

Judy:
Yeah. It must be hard from an epidemiological point of view to figure out when people get sick in 30 different states that it was the spinach. I mean, how would you?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, actually, the FDA has a long discussion of how they did that on their website, and it's quite interesting because the minimal amount of time that it takes to track a case is two weeks.

Judy:
Well, that's pretty quick.

Dr. Nestle:
It takes two weeks from the time somebody gets sick, goes to a doctor, the sample gets sent to a laboratory, the laboratory does the tests, the test gets reported to the state officials, the state officials report it to the federal government, the federal government realizes suddenly that there's more than one case with the same thing. That's a two week process.

Judy:
Yeah. I can see that. So you find out that everybody is sick because of germ X, then linking germ X with spinach, that would seem to be the hard part.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, you do epidemiological investigation. You ask people what they ate, and lo and behold, spinach comes up on 80 percent. That's how they did it, and then one of the interesting things about it is that by the time the FDA issued its recall warning, 85 percent of the cases had already been caught.

Judy:
Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
Or 85 percent of the people who were going to get sick had already gotten sick by the day the FDA issued the recall.

Judy:
So they were really only warning 15 percent. Yeah.

Dr. Nestle:
So, there were 15 percent who drifted later, but it takes so long to be able to track this stuff down that by the time they do it the stuff has already been sold and eaten.

Judy:
Well, I want to switch gears here slightly. In Europe I know the public has been far more concerned about GM or genetically modified foods than Americans have been. In the second part of your book, you talk a lot about GM foods. GM foods, are they actually a real, genuine risk to consumers or not?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it depends on what you mean by risk. I think they are more a question of corporate control over the food supply than they are of actual health risk. And the companies that make genetically modified foods will say nobody has ever died from eating one, and that is a true statement as far as I know. I don't know anybody who has gotten sick from them, and I don't see them as a huge health hazard. What I do see them as is something where consumers have no choice because they are not labeled.

Judy:
They are not labeled?

Dr. Nestle:
And I think even if they are safe, it doesn't mean they are acceptable. They could be unacceptable on other grounds in addition to safety. And I think consumers have a right to know and have a right to make that decision for themselves.

Judy:
So they are not labeled?

Dr. Nestle:
They are not labeled. The FDA in its infinite wisdom decided under enormous pressure from industry - and I know what that pressure was like because I was on an FDA advisory committee at the time that the FDA approved this - and I saw that pressure in action. It was very impressive. They decided that because genetic modification is not any different than standard genetics, there is no difference and it shouldn't be labeled, but that was absolutely a political decision.

Judy:
And remind us what GM foods are. I mean, how they are different? GM spinach, how is that different from spinach that's crossbred in an old Mendelian fashion?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, I would say the simple, dirty answer to that question is that a gene from one organism is put into another, so it crosses over.

Judy:
Well, that happens when you crossbreed plants anyway, right?

Dr. Nestle:
No. No. No. Crossbreeding plants would be within the same organism, would be within the same species. So this is crossing species.

Judy:
Oh, I see. Okay.

Dr. Nestle:
So, that's the difference. But there are a lot of people who object to that on its own basis. There are people who object to it because they just don't like tampering with the food supply. There are people who object to it because they think, "If God wanted this to happen, it would have happened in some other way." Whatever the reasons are, I think those reasons are just as legitimate as there being a safety hazard.

But the industry itself argues that the only thing you can argue about is safety, and I think that's too bad. The FDA bought that. That was a mistake. The stuff should be labeled.

Judy:
But aside from the labeling issue, have GM foods gotten an overly bad rap because my understanding is that some good can come from GM foods. If you can modify the DNA of rice plants and increase production around the world, then fewer people would starve. Is that true or have I just swallowed the industry line?

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah, but we are not there yet. The problem is, we are not there yet. I mean, actually there's hardly anything that's genetically modified in the American supermarkets except for the ingredients in processed foods, because so much of our soybeans and so much of our corn is genetically modified. Anything in a supermarket that contains corn or soybeans and does not say that it's organic or GMO free, you have to assume that the corn or soybeans are genetically modified.

Judy:
Like Fritos or Frito Lay.

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah. If it comes from corn, you would assume that they are genetically modified unless they say that they are organic, unless they say to the contrary. And when I was writing my book "What to Eat," which, by the way, is my most recent book.

Judy:
Okay.

Dr. Nestle:
When I was writing "What to Eat," I was very curious to know whether there were genetically modified foods in the produce section of supermarkets because I knew that the FDA had approved tomatoes, squash, potatoes.

Judy:
There was a tomato, yeah. But it didn't sell, right?

Dr. Nestle:
No. It did never sell, and as far as I can tell, they are not in production, and they are not in supermarkets. And the only thing that I could find where there was any indication that there was a genetic modification was in papayas from Hawaii, which had been modified to resist the ringspot virus that was destroying the papaya crop in Hawaii. And those were the only things that I could find. I actually had them tested.

Judy:
And were they safe?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, we are not talking about safety. This doesn't have anything to do with safety. It's not a safety issue. It has to do with other questions.

Judy:
Okay.

Dr. Nestle:
So they were genetically modified.

Judy:
So, from the safety point of view…

Dr. Nestle:
Are they safe? I think they are safe. I would eat it.

Judy:
Consumers should not be concerned in terms of safety about GM foods?

Dr. Nestle:
I don't know whether they should be concerned or not. They haven't been tested very well.

Judy:
I see.

Dr. Nestle:
But it doesn't seem to me that they have a high probability of being unsafe.

Judy:
Okay.

Dr. Nestle:
It is hard to prove that something is safe.

Judy:
Yes. It's easier to prove that it's unsafe.

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah. It's easier to prove that it's unsafe. It's hard to prove that it's safe. On the other hand, I don't think there is any evidence for harm. I think there are other issues surrounding GM foods that are extremely important and that matter a lot to people, and if the products were labeled, then consumers would have a choice. Right now they don't.

Judy:
Yeah. I think the idea of having an informed choice, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned a minute ago that you are actually writing a book about the pet food recall.

Dr. Nestle:
I am.

Judy:
Remind us of what happened with that, and just give us a brief glimpse of what you are going to say.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, I am going to talk about globalization. The pet food recall occurred because an ingredient that was manufactured in China was shipped to the United States and put into pet foods that were manufactured centrally. It's, again, an issue of industrialization and centralization of the food supply.

And that ingredient was, in effect, the chemical that when it was concentrated enough and mixed with a by product formed crystals that blocked the kidneys of dogs and cats and caused them to get sick and die.

And all of this has to do with the fact the companies themselves didn't know where the ingredient came from. They didn't realize it was made in China. The Chinese weren't monitoring how the ingredient was developed. So nobody was minding the store on this one at all. And then the tainted pet food not only got into these dogs and cats and caused problems with dogs and cats, but then some of the pet food was fed to pigs, chickens and fish that then got into the human food supply.

So one of the lessons of this is that the food supplies for humans, pets, and farm animals are inextricably linked and that if there is a problem with one part of it, it's going to affect all the other parts of the food system. And the whole thing is incredibly global, and at the end, it involved a continent of countries because the stuff was shipped around to so many different places.

Judy:
Yeah. It was incredibly hard to track down the problem.

Dr Nestle:
So I am calling the book "Pet Food Politics: Chihuahua in the Coal Mine," - I love the title. Let's just say it will be out next fall. It is about the idea that this was really an indication of some of the safety hazards of our globalized foods.

Judy:
Yeah. It wasn't until I read your book to prepare for this show that I realized how globalized things are. I mean it's really - it's amazing.

We have an e mail from Sarah in Michigan, and she writes, "How safe is fish, and how closely is it regulated?"

Dr. Nestle:
Oh, such a good question. In my book, "What to Eat," I have five chapters devoted to the complexities of trying to figure out what to do with fish in the supermarkets. In that book, I went around supermarkets, aisle by aisle to try to answer people's questions about it, and the fish chapters were the most complicated because the issues are so complicated.

On the one hand you have got omega-3s, which are supposed to be great for you. On the other hand, you have got methyl mercury and PCBs, and you've got issues with farmed fish, issues with organic fish, issues with colored fish. I mean, it's so complicated.

Judy:
Well, I thought the bottom line is that for most fish, you are better off eating it to get the omega-3s than not eating it because of the mercury.

Dr. Nestle:
Well, I think it's more complicated than that. And certainly the fish that have the highest levels of methyl mercury, I think, should be avoided by pregnant women and young children. I don't think they should eat them. That's tilefish and shark and albacore tuna and so forth. I don't think it is such a great idea, if you are pregnant particularly, and for young women who are planning to become pregnant. That's the advice of the FDA and the EPA, and I think it's good advice to avoid those. Other fish are probably okay.

Judy:
And remind us of what the whole thing with wild versus farmed fish, what that issue is, which is worse?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, at this point, if the fish is wild, and it's not one of these big predatory fish that's at the top of the food chain, it's fine and healthy eating. It's just that there are so few of them left that it's really expensive.

And so in a sense the issue is almost moot, because you practically can't get wild fish anymore. I mean, all of our shrimp is farmed, for example. I mean, with rare exceptions.

Judy:
And what about salmon?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, that is also mostly farmed, and certainly out of season it's farmed.

Judy:
But the salmon that are farmed, they are fed some big corn based…

Dr. Nestle:
Well, they are fed feed pellets just like any other feed. And they are kept in pens that are where the water may not flush out the toxins as much as it should. I mean, there are all kinds of environmental problems that are caused by fish farming. And the issues are so complicated, and the number of fish is so great, and the differences between them are so hard to keep track of that I don't try. I get the fish cards from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and I use those. These are cards that list fish that are okay to eat and that have environmental problems or health problems for each section of the country. You can just go online.

Dr. Nestle:
Farmed salmon is gray. I mean, the reason that salmon have a gorgeous pink color is that they eat krill in the ocean that have this pigment in them, and the pigment accumulates. But farmed salmon don't do that, so they come out this rather unattractive gray color and nobody would buy it. So they have this color that they feed them.

Judy:
And is the color harmful?

Dr. Nestle:
Not that I know of.

Judy:
Red dye number whatever?

Dr. Nestle:
It's red dye number something or other - no. It's astaxanthin. It's going to have some fancy name.

Judy:
But is it dangerous?

Dr. Nestle:
It's more or less okay.

Judy:
More or less okay.

Well, in the last part of your book you talk about food bioterrorism. What do you mean by that term, and is that something else we should be afraid of?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, it's not something that I worry about because there are so many other things to worry about in the food supply. Food bioterrorism refers to deliberate acts of tampering with the food supply for political purposes. The deliberate tampering of pet food, which is what happened in China, that was just out and out fraud. That had nothing to do - that was not being done for a political purpose.

But there has only been one instance of food bioterrorism in the United States, and that was a political incident that happened, oh, I don't know, about 20 years ago. Followers of the Rashneeshes - I can't remember what his first name is - Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh, who was an Indian guru, had moved his followers to this place in Oregon where they tried to throw an election by putting toxic salmonella in salad bars and in cream pitchers in ten different restaurants because they wanted to make everybody sick so they wouldn't vote in an election, and 900 people got sick.

Judy:
Wow, that's a lot.

Dr. Nestle:
Yeah, which was a lot. Nobody died, fortunately. And the Centers for Disease Control came and couldn't figure out what had happened because there was no single source for the illness, and they just couldn't figure it out for a long time. But somebody finally told them what had been done. Somebody confessed to it. And they had just gotten this toxic salmonella from a biological supply house. But you can't do that anymore.

Judy:
Well, can you just do that?

Dr. Nestle:
You can't do it anymore.

Judy:
Would poisoning foods actually be an effective bioterrorism tactic? I mean, would it work?

Dr. Nestle:
We don't even need it. And one of the reasons why I think a farm to table food safety system is so important to this country is that if we were monitoring all these things, the probability of bioterrorists would be much less.

Judy:
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

Dr. Nestle:
I mean, nothing is ever going to be perfectly safe. What you want to do is you want to get the unsafe incidents down as far as you possibly can.

Judy:
So, this farm to table food safety program, does such a plan exist and it's just a question of adopting it,?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, we have these HACCP plans, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Plans. They exist. They just aren't being applied.

Judy:
Do any of the presidential candidates focus on this at all?

Dr. Nestle:
Yes. Both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have come out in favor of single food safety agencies.

Judy:
And is that to say or that would be a step towards this farm to table program?

Dr. Nestle:
Well, then the food safety agency would then do the legislation and the regulation and put the whole thing together in a much more rational way. And both of them have come out in favor of it.

Judy:
Yeah. So that's it. I haven't seen that come up as a real, viable political issue. But I don't know how much it's on people's minds, so maybe nobody is really asking that question.

In any case, we are almost out of time tonight. Dr. Marion Nestle, the author of many books, including one called "Safe Food," do you have any final thoughts you would like to leave us with tonight?

Dr. Nestle:
This is a congressional issue. Write your congressional representatives and tell them what you think about this. This is how the political system works, and if we are going to do anything about food safety in this country, we have to let our congressional representatives know that it matters.

Judy:
Well, that's great to know. I think most people haven't sort of taken it that far in their thinking.

So I would like to thank my guest, Dr. Marion Nestle, and I would like to thank you, the listeners, for joining us. Until next week, I'm Judy Foreman. Good night.

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